Minor, The Pain of All The World, c. 1910
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The New Malthusianism of the Right
How the Right Repackages Malthusian Logic to Justify Exclusion, Fear, and Social Control
James B. Greenberg
Jun 17, 2025
There is an unspoken logic behind the right’s crusade to dismantle the public sphere: a modern Malthusianism, dressed in the language of efficiency and merit, but rooted in something much older and more brutal. It sees poverty not as a structural failure, but as evidence of surplus life—populations deemed unnecessary, unworthy, unfit for rescue.
This worldview doesn’t rely on overt violence. It doesn’t need to. The tools are policy, budget cuts, and selective silence. Remove access to healthcare. Undermine vaccination campaigns. Hollow out the safety net. The result is a slow culling by design—death by bureaucratic abandonment. What emerges is not the spectacle of fascism, but its quieter cousin: a soft, managed cruelty that lets nature, supposedly, take its course.
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The recent gutting of USAID under Elon Musk’s influence is a case in point. A technocrat’s dream of efficiency masks a strategic withdrawal from responsibility. Bill Gates, not often given to hyperbole, warned that this vision leaves the world’s poorest to die at the hands of the world’s richest. It’s not just a policy shift—it’s a value statement. A declaration about whose lives are worth sustaining, and whose are not.
This isn’t new. Malthusian logic has long served as moral cover for violent inequality—from colonial famine policies to eugenics programs to the gatekeeping of immigration. The targets change, but the rationale remains: some lives are worth preserving, others are simply excess. What’s changed is the mechanism. Today it’s not enacted through spectacle or coercion, but through metrics, models, and managed invisibility. The cruelty is buried in algorithms and budget lines.
Malthus imagined famine and disease as natural checks on the population of agrarian societies. But the 21st century presents the opposite challenge. Birthrates in the wealthiest countries have dropped below replacement levels. Scarcity, where it exists, is political, not demographic. Yet the Malthusian myth has endured—reshaped and redeployed as ideological cover for policies of containment and control.
Today, that logic finds new footing in national security circles. Climate change is no longer just an environmental issue—it’s portrayed as a destabilizer of poor nations and a trigger for mass migration. Droughts, floods, and crop failures become reframed not as humanitarian emergencies, but as threats to the wealth and borders of the Global North. Migrants are recast as invaders. The displaced become suspects. Fortress policies follow.
But these policies don’t just emerge from fear—they serve profit. As walls rise and aid retracts, private security firms, data contractors, and border surveillance industries step in. Crisis becomes a business model. Technologies once pitched as humanitarian tools—satellite tracking, biometric IDs, AI forecasting—are now deployed to sort, exclude, and contain. The logic remains unchanged: manage the risk, shield the center, and let the margins fall away.
What’s most revealing is how this rhetoric obscures the actual source of vulnerability. It isn’t overpopulation that drives suffering—it’s the uneven distribution of power, resources, and the means of survival. Climate change doesn’t kill indiscriminately. It amplifies existing inequalities. It hits hardest where protections have been deliberately withdrawn.
This isn’t governance. It’s triage on a planetary scale. And it reflects a profound shift in the function of the state—from protector to gatekeeper, from provider to sorter. The new Malthusianism isn’t about managing numbers. It’s about managing narratives—who belongs, who drains, who deserves.
Anthropologists have long studied how states make populations legible, governable, and expendable. What we’re witnessing now is a recalibration of that calculus under the pressures of climate, capital, and ideology. The danger is not just that certain lives are deemed unworthy—but that their abandonment becomes rational, even moralized.
We are told this is simply how the world works now. But that’s not true. It’s how power works when it no longer pretends to care. But people are not numbers. And history reminds us that even in the shadow of abandonment, solidarity can rewrite the script.
Suggested Readings
Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Biehl, João. “The Juridical Afterlife of the Poor: Brazilian Public Health and the Politics of Abandonment.” Journal of Political Ecology 15 (2008): 1–18.
Greenberg, James B., and Thomas K. Park, eds. Terrestrial Transformations: Political Ecology, Climate, and the Remaking of Planet Earth. New York: Lexington Books, 2023.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014.
Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The Rise of Necro/Narco-Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the National Borderlands. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2025.
Weizman, Eyal. The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza.London: Verso, 2012.
